Hist1122Darwinism

The Shaping of the "Second Europe" by Revolutions, 1750-1914

The Darwinian Revolution

Outline of Lecture

I. Introduction
II. Charles Darwin (1809-1892)
III. Darwin's Theory of Evolution by Natural Selection
IV. The Impact of Darwin's Theory
V. Social Darwinism
VI. Darwin's Theory and Religion
VII. The Darwinian Revolution and the Second Europe

Introduction

The third of the revolutions affecting the 19^th century and helping produce "isms" was Charles Darwin's theory of evolution by natural selection. Although not seemingly a historical event of the magnitude of the French Revolution or the Industrial Revolution, Darwin's work in its own way constituted a revolution. It had a profoundly stimulating, creative and unsettling effect on all intellectual and artistic life from the mid 19^th century forward. We shall see it influence naturalist writers to think about their characters and themes in new ways, Friedrich Nietzsche to expound a new anti-rational view of truth, and Social Darwinists to argue for imperialism. The revolution started in the mind of Charles Darwin.

Charles Darwin (1809-1882)

Darwin was born in 1809 (the same day, the same year as Abraham Lincoln) to a prominent family whose members and relations included some of the leading intellectuals of the age. One grandfather was the scientist, Erasmus Darwin. Another was the master-potter, Josiah Wedgwood, founder of the famous Wedgwood pottery line. One cousin was Francis Galton, famous as a scientist, explorer, and the founder of eugenics; another was William Darwin Fox, an entomologist. Sent to Edinburgh to study medicine, he hated it (no anesthesia, remember) and was then enrolled in Cambridge to study theology (1827). He sounds like a young man who could not make up his mind and was, as we say today, drifting. He himself said later he was "wasting" his time. His one love was collecting plants, insects, and geological formations. His biology professor, John Henslow, pulled strings and got him appointed as a naturalist on the H.M.S. Beagle which was leaving in 1831 to sail around the globe on a surveying trip. Darwin's father opposed the trip; he wanted Darwin to become a clergyman and thought the voyage would corrupt his morals. But the voyage of the Beagle turned out to be the decisive event in Darwin's life. On this trip he had a chance to observe, think and read extensively. (The captain, Robert Fitzroy, welcomed him aboard with a copy of Charles Lyell's Principles of Geology). His reading of Lyell and Thomas Malthus (remember his Essay on the Principle of Population?) and the different life forms he observed made him question the idea of fixed species. He had observed too many examples of variation in the same life forms to believe that the species did not change. The problem was why they changed. This still eluded him.

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What is your reaction to Darwin's aimless youth? Can you predict success or fame? Remember Isaac Newton's unpromising youth?

After 5 years, Darwin returned to England with a pile of journals and sketches which he began to publish and which won him a reputation as a naturalist and geologist. Zoology of the Voyage of the Beagle was published in 1839-43. In the 1840's he first put on paper a tentative theory about the origin of species and evolution based on what he called "natural selection". He still did not publish the theory, perhaps because of caution, perhaps because of fear of the implications of his theory. As a letter of January, 1844, confessed, "I am almost convinced (quite contrary to [the] opinion I started with) that species are not (it is almost like confessing a murder) immutable." Darwin worked into the next decade on his "Big Book" expanding on his theory and feeling no pressure to publish. Until 1858. A young naturalist Alfred Wallace sent him a paper that year for comments before submitting it to the Linnean Society. Darwin was shocked and dismayed. Wallace's paper proposed natural selection as the basis for a theory of evolution. Would Wallace would get credit for a theory Darwin had thought of first? Darwin's friends persuaded him to submit his own paper outlining the theory of evolution by natural selection to the Linnean Society. To his credit, Darwin sent his paper, together with Wallace's paper, to the Linnean Society. The same conference heard both papers in 1858. Darwin then got to work in earnest on his "Big Book" and in 1859 published The Origin of Species.

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Does Darwin's generousity about Wallace's work surprise you?

The first printing sold out the day of publication. It aroused a storm of controversy, praised for its originality and attacked because it seemed to remove God's design from the origin of species. Eventually most biologists accepted the theory of evolution by natural selection. But it continued to make enemies among the clergy and the traditionally devout, to Darwin's own sorrow. He never intended that his work be taken as an attack on traditional religion. In the Origin itself he took pains not to cause religious offence:

I see no good reason why the views given in this volume should shock the religious feelings of any one. It is satisfactory, as showing how transient such impressions are, to remember that the greatest discovery ever made by man, namely, the law of the attraction of gravity, was also attacked by Leibniz, "as subversive of natural, and inferentially of revealed, religion." A celebrated author and divine has written to me that "he had gradually learnt to see that it is just as noble a conception of the Deity to believe that He created a few original forms capable of self-development into other and needful forms, as to believe that He required a fresh act of creation to supply the voids caused by the action of His laws".

But by the time he wrote his Autobiography he seemed unable to make up his mind about the religious implications of his work. On the one hand, he confessed, "there seems to be no more design in the variability of organic beings and in the action of natural selection than in the course which the wind blows." On the other, he declared, "everything in nature is the result of fixed laws." Which was it, chance or design? In the end he left the matter unresolved: "The mystery of the beginning of all things is insoluble to us; and I for one must be content to remain an Agnostic." Darwin continued to write until the end of his life despite ill health. In 1871 he published The Descent of Man and Selection in Relation to Sex, hypothesizing that the human race descended from a hairy animal of the great anthropoid group. As such, man was related to the ancestors of the orangutan, chimpanzee, and gorilla. He posited sexual selection as fundamental in human evolution. Although Darwin produced a number of other works, none equaled the importance of Origin or Descent. After a long illness, first contracted on the voyage of the Beagle, Darwin died in 1882. He was buried in Westminster Abbey only a few steps away from the tomb of Isaac Newton. Both revolutionized the way people saw the world. How fitting that they lie together.

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If you ever make it to London, go to Westminster Abbey if you go nowhere else. You walk in the presence of more great figures than anywhere else for my money.

Darwin's Theory of Evolution by Natural Selection

Darwin was not the first to propose a theory of evolution. His grandfather, Erasmus Darwin (1731-1802), articulated one of the earliest theories, explaining that all living animals and plants came from microscopic life. Later, Jean Baptiste de Lamarck (1744-1829) offered a theory which explained how evolution happened. Organisms changed because of an inner will or desire to change according to two laws: (1) the law of use and disuse which caused organs to grow or shrink; and (2) the law of acquired characteristics which enabled organisms to pass on their acquired characteristics to their offspring.

Darwin's own theory grew out of observations made on the Galapagos Islands during the Beagle's voyage and from reading Lyell's Geology and Malthus' Population. Lyell's work stressed that the natural forces which were presently causing geological change were the same forces which had always been at work, slowly changing the earth to its present state. Darwin's observations of plants and animals on Galapagos suggested that life had changed from island to island. The question was, why? One day while reading Malthus's Population, Darwin said he got the answer. Malthus' thesis is that animals, particularly man, tend to increase faster than the available food supply, and thus there is a struggle for existence. "It at once struck me," Darwin said, "that under these circumstances favorable variations would tend to be preserved, and unfavorable variations be destroyed. The result of this would be the formation of new species. Here, then, I had at last got a theory by which to work." This was the principle of "natural selection" which Darwin said was the key to the development of new species.

Darwin stated the fundamental thesis of Origin of Species as follows:

...the innumerable species, genera, and families of organic beings with which the world is peopled have all descended, each within its own class or group, from common parents, and have all been modified in the course of descent.

That which modified them was a "struggle for existence". Borrowing from Malthus, Darwin said that organisms tend to overproduce and as they do so also produce variation in characteristics. Since not all organisms can survive there is competition. And in this struggle those with favorable variations which give them advantages in the struggle with other organisms tend to survive. They are the fittest. If they hand on these favorable variations, and if the variations are enhanced by further variations, the surviving organisms could in time evolve into an entirely different kind of organism, a new species. The process was called "natural selection" because nature, the environment was selecting for survival those organisms which could adapt to the environment. "Sexual selection" aided in this survival. The fittest members of a species would tend to mate to bring forth the fittest offspring.

The Impact of Darwin's Theory

Darwin was strictly a scientist. All he was interested in was the implication of evolution by natural selection in biological life. But his ideas had an immediate impact on the work of others and on society at large in all sorts of ways. Thomas Henry Huxley (1825-1896), a physical anthropologist and President of the Royal Society, became the leading advocate of the theory of natural selection and "Darwin's Bulldog" against critics and enemies. He defended natural selection in Evidence as to Man's Place in Nature (1863). Summing up what many thought, Huxley said, "The Origin provided us with the working hypothesis we sought. It is doubtful if any single book, except the Principia [Newton's work] ever worked so great and rapid a revolution in science or made so deep an impression on the modern mind." It was because of Darwin's popularizers, chief of who was Huxley, that Darwin's work had such an impact.

The idea of "struggle for existence" seemed to have a particular appeal to the age. Laissez-faire economics, private enterprise capitalism, and its emphasis on competition had by Darwin's time been widely accepted as the reason for prosperity based on industrialism. Darwin's idea seemed to give scientific sanction to laissez-faire. In the United States, John D. Rockefeller put in words what many agreed with when he said that Big Business was "a survival of the fittest . . .the working out of a law of nature and a law of God." Andrew Carnegie, his contemporary, also believed in the struggle for existence. Even if it makes things, "hard for the individual, it is best for the race, because it insures the survival of the fittest in every department." Even social reformers and revolutionaries found the idea of struggle for existence a formative idea. Karl Marx, for instance, talked about the evolution of society through a struggle between classes.

Literature also exhibits the impact of the idea of “struggle for existence”. Alfred, Lord Tennyson worried about the seeming chance and caprice of nature "red in tooth and claw." He allayed those fears with a religious faith which he felt it necessary to drew on in greater and greater measure, but he still had the fears. And Gustave Flaubert picked up the theme in Madame Bovary in both his creation of characters and in the life he left them to live once he had created them. The world is driven by elemental forces against which his characters struggle in almost every case unsuccessfully. That is the meaning of naturalism in literature. Flaubert's characters struggles for survival against their environment, aided if they have favorable variations (those of the jungle) and doomed if they do not.

Social Darwinism

The application of struggle for existence to groups and states is called Social Darwinism. One of the first to make that application was Herbert Spencer (1820-1903), a civil engineer, journalist, and one of the founders of sociology. Author of many works, Spencer believed the history of societies was a struggle for existence among social organisms leading to the "survival of the fittest." Spencer, in fact, coined the phrase, not Darwin. To insure the survival of the fittest, Spencer opposed any governmental function except the protection of the rights of the individual and the protection of society against foreign enemies. All else is up to individuals to do for themselves by making contracts and agreements with each other. Think about the implications of this. No public post office, no social welfare, no public education, no public health service or care. None of the services people have come to expect in the modern welfare state. If the individual could not make agreements himself to obtain these services, he suffered the consequences. And the fittest survived. Ironically, Spencer, who advocated private enterprise in almost every area of society, making the state little more than a policing and defense force, is buried in Highgate Cemetery with Karl Marx.

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Talk with me a minute about Herbert Spencer's ideas.

The classic statement of Social Darwinism, however, was Walter Bagehot's Physics and Politics (1872). Bagehot said,

The majority of the groups which win and conquer are better than the majority of those which fall and perish. Conquest is the premium given by nature to those national characters which their national customs have made most fit to win in war, and in many most material respects those characters are really the best characters."

Social Darwinists rationalized war. In Germany, Heinrich von Treitschke said to his students:

The grandeur of war lies in the utter annihilation of puny man in the great conception of the State. . . .In war the chaff is winnowed from the wheat....The grandeur of history lies in the perpetual conflict of nations, and it is simply foolish to desire the suppression of their rivalry.

And in the United States Theodore Roosevelt declared that war alone enabled men to "acquire those virile qualities necessary to win in the stern strife of actual life."

Social Darwinism also led to injecting racialist ideas into nationalism. Being victorious over another nation or race meant being better than the defeated people. This was the theme of an English writer Houston Stewart Chamberlain (1855-1927) in Foundations of the Nineteenth Century (1899). Chamberlain asserted that the Germanic race found in Britain, Germany, and Scandinavia was destined to rule the world because of its racial superiority to other peoples. And Benjamin Kidd, another British author, declared in Social Evolution (1894) that the Anglo-Saxon peoples (by which he meant Americans and British) under British leadership would eventually rule the world. You will see the implications of this kind of thinking for imperialism when we get to that subject later in the course.

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Do you like any of these ideas?

Darwin's Theory and Religion

The most controversial of Darwinism's effects was on religion, leading to a larger conflict between science and religion. Darwin's theory by appearing to remove God from the creative process and substituting a random factor, chance, in the development of the species, raised questions about basic Christian beliefs. Scholars, influenced by science, wanted to treat Scripture as a text to be analyzed, not as sacred revealed writing, but as any other text. "Higher criticism," as such study was called, showed that the books of the Bible were not written until after the times they purported to describe. Comparative religious studies showed the common elements in all religions and tended to discount Christianity as being unique. Scholars tended to humanize Jesus and to eliminate the supernatural from his life.

For the average believer the impact of Darwin's theory seemed even more shattering. Darwin had challenged the accepted Christian view of creation and by making man just another part of creation had taken him off his place at the pinnacle of creation. If man evolves like any other creature, why should it be said that he alone has an immortal soul? And if he has one, when did he acquire it? Roman Catholicism responded to this challenge better than Protestantism. The Roman Church in reaction to the theory of evolution and the challenge of science proclaimed the doctrine of papal infallibility in 1870. Not until the 20^th century would the Church soften its opposition to evolution. Protestantism, on the other hand, was not united in its reaction to Darwin's ideas. In Protestantism the Bible was more important and Darwin's theory appeared to undercut the Bible. Some accepted evolution wholeheartedly; others could not. The debate goes on today.

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Do you believe there is any conflict between faith and Darwin's theory of evolution? Can you believe both or only one? Why?

The Darwinian Revolution and the Second Europe

By placing man squarely in the evolutionary process and treating him as another creature struggling to compete for existence, did Darwin call into question Enlightenment assumptions about man and the world? In one sense, yes. Does evolution make man an end in himself, the center of concern, or merely a stage in evolution to be superseded by a better creature? Is he a reasoning being in charge of his destiny or driven by forces just like any other animal? Is the world governed by chance rather than order? Or to take the opposing view, is evolution producing a better human being, a stronger, fitter man? And is the Darwinian view of the world still a view that the world is governed by order? The order of the evolutionary process? I suppose the answer to this last question depends on whether you believe natural selection is chance, caprice, the luck of the throw. If you do, then chance is no kind of order. Or is it?

Evolution did not definitely challenge the Enlightenment vision of the future. After all, evolution is producing, according to the Social Darwinists like Herbert Spencer, a better breed. And that leads to Progress. Nor did Darwin's theory seem necessarily to challenge the Enlightened view of the state. Indeed, the Enlightenment thought that the state existed to protect life, liberty, and property. And the Social Darwinist state did that. Its function was to insure that competition existed. It did not exist to protect the weak against the rich and powerful, because competition was good for society. Bad for the individual, but good for society.